


nothing

by WingsOfTime



Series: roza [2]
Category: Guild Wars 2 (Video Game)
Genre: All or Nothing, Gen, Vague Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-16
Updated: 2019-01-16
Packaged: 2019-10-11 05:59:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17441255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WingsOfTime/pseuds/WingsOfTime
Summary: Death creeps like rot, when left to itself. It creeps into your soul, and it clings.





	nothing

**Author's Note:**

> takes place after s4 ep5, all or nothing. contains minor direct spoilers, but major ones are implied.

It isn’t that difficult to track someone who’s leaking so much sap into the snow that their entire trail is marked by intermittent golden splotches. Like tears, almost, seeping into the ice and crystalizing in a cruel imitation of the heart that is shedding them.

Or like the flesh races’ piss. Canach has never been a poet.

Thankfully, Roza’s wounds seem to be either stabilizing unnaturally quickly, or he is healing himself somehow. The sap stains become increasingly sporadic, until, at least an hour into what seems to have been a painful and jarring journey that was made on _foot_ —Canach spares a fleeting thought as to why Roza isn’t with his beloved griffon—there is only one last, pale droplet, spattered in the snow.

Roza himself is within view, kneeling on the frozen ground nearby, so Canach doesn’t consider the end of the trail to be too much of a loss.

Inky black eyes immediately lock onto Canach as he stalks closer, any noise produced by the slip of his gracefulness from the recent battle lost in the vast emptiness of the snow. Canach isn’t the one who’s just been mauled by an elder dragon, but the Branded aren’t exactly as friendly as the fighters in his pretty little money ring, either. He should get himself seen by a mender, he knows, but… well, they all should. And here they are.

“What?” Roza says when Canach is barely near enough to hear.

His voice seems scared of the one word, whispering around it instead of crackling and breaking through it. Perhaps he’s scared of breaking in front of Canach, then. Perhaps he doesn’t remember how to, and all he can do is exist as a whisper.

“Roza,” Canach says, and for once, his voice is heavy with a lack of levity. He finds he cannot make the edges of it curl.

Roza beckons to him, crooks bone-white fingers that seem more osseous than Canach remembers before placing them back placidly into his lap. His face, too, almost looks skeletal, cheeks cutting sharply above sunken bark and eyes that seem to draw darkness into them as if they are trying to imitate human sockets.

Ridiculous, Canach knows rationally. A sylvari is only similar to a human in superficial imitation. And yet… something can be said for that, can it not?

He stands next to Roza, because his pride is a sharp, biting thing, and he will not kneel in the ground next to a weeping sapling. Then he sits. Roza is not weeping.

“You didn’t think to bring a cushion or something, did you?” Canach asks. “I feel like my arse is going to freeze off before we’re done having this melodramatic conversation.”

Roza reaches for his back, and strips off a long, dead leaf to lay it on the ground. Canach watches as another one forms over the wound it had been covering, rotten and green with necrotic energy.

So that is what he’s been doing. “So that is why you smell so bad,” Canach says instead. If Roza thinks he is going to sit on _that_ , then he missed slapping his dead leaves on a head wound.

Roza shrugs, just barely. “It works,” he mutters.

 _Three_ words, now. Melodramatic indeed.

“Silly little sapling,” says Canach. Roza’s head tilts towards him—he hates being called that. “Dead things,” Canach continues, “can only harm, not heal.”

Roza stills. It is almost imperceptible, considering he has barely been moving in the first place, but Canach is very good at what he does, and still alive to this day.

He shifts into a crouch. “If you want it to heal, then this plant,” he taps Roza’s back, on the disgusting rot, “needs to find some way to be alive.”

Then he wipes his hand off in the snow, gets up, and walks away. The leaf on the ground curls, withers, and, faster than would be possible without magic, decomposes into nothing.


End file.
